Just hazing? The US and torture

Tom Engelhardt over at
Mother Jones
has written an excellent article about the Untied States’ use of torture, the way it has become a religion with the current administration and the wider Republican establishment and how it intersects with the wider politics of the Bush administration.

A partial list of methods of torture recently reported (or reported yet again) would include: detainees chained hand and foot to the floor in a fetal position for up to 24 hours without food or water and left to lie in their own fecal matter; detainees beaten and kicked while hooded; paraded naked around a courtyard while photos were being snapped; left in extreme hot or cold temperatures for extended periods; wrapped in an Israeli flag while loud rap music played and strobe lights flashed; or possibly even having fingernails torn out; placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees’ ear openings; sleep deprivation; partial strangulation; death threats during interrogation; the use of dogs to force frightened prisoners to urinate; the holding of wires from an electric transformer to a detainee’s shoulders, so that the man “danced as he was shocked”; mock drowning or “waterboarding”; mock executions of Iraqi juveniles; severely burning a detainee’s hands by covering them in alcohol and igniting them; holding a pistol to the back of a detainee’s head while another Marine takes a picture; fake (and real) acts of sexual assault and sodomy; being hit with rifle butts; suffering electric shocks and immersion in cold water; being beaten to death. These and other crimes against very specific humanity have taken place from Guantanamo to Iraq, Afghanistan to the CIA’s secret prisons around the world.

Once you take certain kinds of restraints away, once you open up certain possibilities, these tend to be transformed into acts at a staggering speed and then to multiply like so many computer viruses.
Offshore, torture as a way of life spreads, it seems, with a startling rapidity. It begins with a sense of impunity at the top and soon infects the most distant nooks and crannies, the farthest outposts, fire bases and holding cells of distant lands like Afghanistan. It moves like quicksilver all the way down to those “bad apples” manning the night shift and taking digital photos for future screen-savers in the Abu Ghraibs of our world. It has already become an American way of life and, having been initiated at home, it will certainly return to the Homeland.

The warmongers and the pro-war socalled left have from the first tried to deny both the truth of these
tortures and its severity, claiming, in the words of at least one well-known rightwing radio commentator, that these are little more than frat hazings. Having had Misha Glenny’s excellent book on the Balkans and its history for reading material lately though, I cannot help but notice the simularity between the above list and some of the descriptions of torture in that book. It’s easy to minimise these tortures if you’re not the one who has to undergo them, but I doubt any of these scoffers would like to trade places.

The larger point Tom Engelhardt raises is that the use of torture by the US government, either directly or indirectly is not new to the Bush administration; succesive Democratic and Republican presidents both had no qualms to use it when convenient. What is new however is the institutionalisation of torture as a political instrument and the legalisation of it. There is the Gulag Archipelago the US has now finished constructing in Guantanomo, Diego Garcia and in client states in Central Asia. There is the legal ass covering done by the man Bush now wants to be his attorney general, head of the department of justice. There is the propaganda that lies about the severity of the torture while not so subtly implying these people deserve it anyway.

It all seems like classic fascism, doesn’t it: the insistence that might makes right, that the leader
should be followed unquestionably, the idea that the current (neverending) crisis justifies extreme behaviour and above all the idea that there is an omnipresent enemy, easily identifyable yet shadowy, that is out to do us harm. It’s only a matter of them, I fear, before torture is going to be used against Bush’s internal enemies…

Torture

We’ve all seen the photos by now and been disgusted by them. US and UK soldiers torturing prisoners? Surely that’s something
that couldn’t happen, shouldn’t have happened. Surely it is only an isolated occurrence, done by a few psychopaths and this should not reflect on the UK or US military as a whole. Even Bush himself said:

“I share a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated,” Bush said.
“Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people. That’s not the way we do
things in America.”

Isn’t it?

I genuinely would like to believe that, but I’m not sure I can. I don’t think these were isolated incidents. Ever since the September 11 attacks, the US leaders have fostered an atmosphere in which civil liberties and human rights are to be shoved aside in the name of security. Guantanamo Bay, the way in which Josef Padilla and others are held indefinately without charge, the prisoners taken during the Aghanistan campaign and in Iraq who are still held in the region, the alleged transfer of prisoners from US custody to countries who don’t have great moral objections against torture, the support for dictatorial regimes who make the appropriate anti-terrorist noises, all of them point to the inescapeable conclusion that this is how “we do things in America”.

If their leaders give such sterling examples, can you blame these soldiers for being extra zealous?

Consider also the wider content. First, you have this atmosphere of fear drummed into us by the Bush administration, where we are told drastic measures are needed to keep us safe, that we don’t have time for legal niceties and where civil and human rights are luxuries. Second, there is the inevitable wartime dehumanisation of the enemy, combined with the US military’s emphasis on keeping its troops safe, no matter the cost in enemy or bystanders’ lifes. If nobody bats an eye at US snipers killing ambulance drivers during the battle for Fallujah, why the outrage about what happens after the battle is over?

Third, this is made worse by the framing of the war against Iraq and the wider War Against Terror, as a struggle between good and evil, where “we” are Good and the enemy is Evil and so anything “we” do is automatically right, while anything the enemy does is automatically wrong. Finally, this Manchurian worldview has always had a strong attraction for a lot of Americans; in a culture where quite a lot of people consider prison rape not as much an unfortunate excess as an integral and welcome part of the prison system, is it strange that enemy prisoners are sexually abused?

This is not to say that all or even most US and UK soldiers would do these things, but these are not “isolated incidents” either.